Ok, if you don’t know what l33t is then you are most certainly a n00b, newb, newbie, or nub and it will suxors when the enemy zerg rushes your ass kekeke! Lucky for you the Candid Guide is here to help to turn you from pwned to pwnage. So what the hell does this all mean? And who the hell is responsible for making this crap up?

Well, as more and more people got connected to the internet and began substituting it more and more for real life a sort of jargon appeared that was popularized mainly by those who made ASCII art. ASCII is just the collection of 94 characters used in the English language (because after all when the internet and before that computers where invented nobody stopped to think that maybe other countries would like to use these things too). Some of these words where formed by typos, others by warez culture, and still others like pr0n where brought about by the necessity of having to send dirty e-mails to your colleagues without your boss finding out.

While most of these words still only apply to and are used by gamers many of them have become as pervasive in real life as the death rays coming out of your cellphone; the most famous of these being the all too common LOL, or lawl. If everyone was actually laughing out loud or rolling on the floor laughing their ass off (roflmao) every time they wrote one of these, the noise pollution in urban settings would skyrocket and we’d have to wash our clothes (and our floors) way more often.

How many times have you written a text message or e-mail only to get back an angry reply misunderstanding the intentions of your message? Sarcasm, sneering, and muttering are just a few examples of human behavior that’s hard or impossible to replicate through these modern means of communication. Hence the use of smilies or emoticons, these universally understood symbols represent nearly every human emotion, and best of all most of them can be represented using your normal keyboard characters (albeit sideways). Want to make a sarcastic comment to your girl friend about how ugly she is? Just add the :-P at the end to make sure it’s not misunderstood. There are emoticons for nearly everything from hugging to puking and everything in between. In fact adding an emoticon at the end of nearly every sentence of a message or e-mail will give people the impression that you are fun and outgoing and have a lot of character; you must be since you’ve gone from :-D to :’-( to ;-P in under a paragraph.

It’s been proven that our online personalities can differ greatly from our real selves. A shy nerd will hit on a cheerleader from his class with the utmost skill and suaveness, but only during the hour and a half online time his mom allows him on the family computer. There are a number of reasons for this, such as not having to make eye contact, and being able to think before having to respond, but in any case we can all agree that society is much easier to deal with behind the safety of a monitor.